Still afternoon

There was this ripeness about that time ,might be just 15 years ago in calendar time in small town of Bengal where cable tv still did not rule conversations and internet et all were beyond the horizon of the place but that was a different era . There was a majestic mellowness in everything in how the sun moved from morning gold to the midday warmth all the way down to the champagne sobriety of the evening, the passage of the days of winter vacation, badminton with aunts in the evenings and the promise of new story books, for the boy there was a touch of magic in everything.
Mornings dawned slowly through the mysterious knit of the green and the mist of the giant old wood apple tree beyond the north window of the common bedroom and by the time golden rays of sun came playing through the east windows , the room was sweeped and cleaned its sanctity restored. The boy would be lazy to get up but there would voices chiding and harrying him . There will still be freshness in the air and dews glistening on blades of the grass when this king beheld his Xanadu once again with the delight. The old building winced under its cracks and age lines and promised the boy of another story of mystery at the deserted west room that afternoon. Grandma was calling for breakfast the boy ran , there was so much to do the hole he was digging beside the tall papaya tree in the garden off their ground floor room then there was the borrowed arabian nights book that has to be finished . He had to play priest and peep down the rabbit hole of religion. He had to create empires with bamboo stick bows and arrows .
The old house had many rooms abandoned and padlocked or just left to crumble and wither and each of them had a story to tell. When the denizens drooped to the siesta after the busy morning of the lively buzz, the silence only broken momentarily by the stirring pigeons,the boy loved to chase these mysteries in the stillness of the afternoon tiptoeing through unfrequented corridors over mounds of pigeon droppings .... the spell of the intoxicating silence could only be broken by the call of "raabdi malaai ..." , the smiling messiah , the lean old man with a big earthenware haandi on a rickety cycle would be there returning every year at the vacations . Or there would the ice candy man hawking his wares whatever the agent of delight it would always be peppered by the disagreement of a consenting benevolent grandma bestowing a bounty of five rupees for the ice creams and the warring aunt vehemently opposing the idea of ice cream.
The bike was drumming through the deserted highway on the still afternoon , the same stillness in a different era and age but a pair of eyes under the helmet has stopped digging holes in ground for magic . It could be so that living through life is like stringing on a necklace of pearls , pearls of experience and when that pearl falls into its place its time to move on to the next pearl never to return to the one already strung.